Despite her departure from Iran in 1997, the Iranian-American novelist Azar Nafisi saw herself for a long time, in her dream, in her apartment in Tehran. Those dreams have ceased. The building was destroyed, like many old buildings in the capital. But since the beginning of the uprising, the 75-year-old novelist has now had this dream in broad daylight: that of returning to her native country. She talks about it to her foreign friends, promises to invite them there.
“Iran is an integral part of me, I sometimes forget it, she confides on December 3, passing through Paris for a meeting with readers. Maybe it took an event like this uprising to wake up that part of me, for me to regain consciousness. » The author of the bestselling novel Read Lolita in Tehran (Plon, 2004) understood that “something exceptional” was happening in her home country, when her husband, who follows the news closely, told her what the protesters’ slogan was: “Woman, life, freedom”.
For her, the issue of revolt is literally vital: “This movement has a goal: to find life, because the Islamic Republic has deprived us of the one we always wanted to have. By recovering freedom, we will also recover lost life. The fight of the Iranians is not only a political resistance, but an existential struggle. » Unlike previous protest movements in Iran, the one that has been going on since September hardly calls for reforms within the regime. “The demonstrators know that this regime cannot be reformed, what they want is the fall of the system, that is to say a revolution”, says the writer.
Azar Nafisi comes from a wealthy background. His mother was a senator for a while, his father mayor of Tehran from 1961 to 1963. A lover of literature and cinema, he passed on his love of art to her very early on. When she was 13, her parents decided to send her to study in the United Kingdom. She will continue her studies in English and American literature in the United States. An active member of the Confederation of Iranian Students Abroad, she mobilized, along with other supporters of the revolution, against the Shah’s regime.
After the overthrow of the monarch in 1979, Azar Nafisi returned to Iran with her husband, a building and public works engineer. She became a teacher at the University of Tehran, in the department of English literature. But when the veil became compulsory in universities in 1981, she left her post in protest.
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